Checkbook Diplomacy - Part Two
Big egos, big donations, big status
BY Stephanie Mencimer | August 12, 2008
When George W. Bush took office, the White House personnel director, Clay Johnson, was inundated with more than 1,700 applications from would-be ambassadors. And why not?
The salary may be relatively modest, but the job — at least at the choicest postings — sure has it perks: beautiful surroundings, domestic staff, the potential to hobnob with the elite. Ambassadorial residences are often located in choice real estate. For instance, Villa Taverna, the ambassador’s residence in Rome, is a restored 16th century villa that includes seven walled acres of gardens, making it the largest private park in the city. The compound, which takes up an entire city block, includes a movie theater and a swimming pool.
Not only that, being appointed an ambassador bestows status as close to aristocracy as an American can get, so ambassadorships are a powerful inducement for fundraising among the rich and powerful. “There are $32 egos and $32 million egos,” says Charles Manatt, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to 1985 and ambassador to the Dominican Republic during the last 15 months of the Clinton administration. He says that some people who’ve been financially successful but don’t think they’ve gotten appropriate recognition covet the positions. There are lots of reasons people want to be ambassadors, he says, but for many of the big donors, “I think it’s an ego thing.”
The ego thing can be an expensive thing — of the 124 political appointments to foreign postings Bush had made as of January 2007, 53 went to people who had been “Rangers” or “Pioneers,” people who had raised or donated $100,000 or $200,000, respectively, to his campaigns. Appointments for sale are thus a major part of “the buying of the president,” the political marketplace that opens for business every four years, and the bidding builds as Election Day nears.
For all the glitter of an ambassadorship, it is also serious business. An ambassador, according to a State Department manual, “personally represents the president of the United States . . . directs all U.S. programs and personnel” and “carries ultimate responsibility for executing U.S. foreign policy goals and coordinating and managing all U.S. government functions in the host country.”
Nonetheless, in administration after administration it has only been a matter of time before a politically appointed ambassador stars in a scandal, embarrassing either our country because of inappropriate behavior abroad, the president who made the appointment, or both. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s political ideology wrapped in insensitivity to the host country’s mores, and sometimes it’s sex. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, appointed physician Herman Baruch, brother of financier Bernard Baruch, as ambassador to Portugal, where his escapades with local women created a small scandal. That resulted in Baruch’s reposting to the Netherlands, where it happened again.
And the political appointees are a constant thorn in the side of the professional diplomatic corps.
“If you’re a career Foreign Service officer and your ultimate ambition is to reach the ambassadorial level, and you find that your opportunities are cut by 50 or 60 percent by virtue of political appointments at the ambassadorial level, you don’t appreciate the process,” Lawrence F. O’Brien Jr., an aide to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, told an oral historian. “By the same token,” he added, “those in the White House haven’t any great concern about your lack of appreciation.”
According to a senior Foreign Service officer, the problem with letting inexperienced people serve as ambassadors is that many think their success in making money makes them good at everything else, and of course makes them better equipped to handle diplomatic tasks than the humble government employees in the Foreign Service. “A lot of them, if they’ve made a lot of money, they think they’re going to come in and fix things, and of course, they bungle it up,” says the officer, who, being diplomatic, declined to be quoted by name. “People in other countries are appalled that the Americans do it this way.”
Americaquest Mortgage Company founder Roland Arnall set aside $325 million for a predatory lending settlement the same day President George W. Bush nominated him for an ambassadorial post. (Department of State)Malcom Toon, a top career diplomat who served as ambassador to four countries, including the Soviet Union, from 1969 to 1979, declared in April 1982 that President Reagan was using U.S. diplomatic posts as “a dumping ground” for political donors and defeated GOP politicians. “We have a man in London who owes his place in life to the fact that his parents founded a furniture-polish dynasty. His only qualification for the job is that he speaks English,” said Toon, referring to John J. Louis Jr., a major GOP donor whose family founded S.C. Johnson Wax. Toon later complained to The New York Times — not so diplomatically — that some of Reagan’s appointees “have made us look like the laughingstock of the world.”
While some of Reagan’s donor-appointees were content to busy themselves with big- game hunting, others relished the opportunity to exercise their anti-government ideology. In 1981, on the recommendation of William F. Buckley Jr., the late conservative writer, Reagan named investment banker Evan G. Galbraith as ambassador to France. Galbraith had nothing but scorn for government employees — and not a particularly high regard for the socialist government of France, either. Galbraith publicly criticized the Foreign Service and advocated replacing all professional ambassadors with doctors, lawyers, and businessmen like him. He thought the Foreign Service was full of confrontation-averse liberals and that “ambassadors should be out there running an offensive game. The real role in a major embassy,” he told The New York Times in 1985, “is to be an effective spokesman for the president’s views.”
As such, during his tenure, Galbraith, a staunch anti-communist, went on French TV and called the communists in the government “poor Frenchmen who have gone astray.” His public comments frequently roiled the French, who were not too sorry to see him leave.
Perhaps the most egregious offender among President Clinton’s diplomatic roster was M. Larry Lawrence, the millionaire businessman whose fabricated stories of World War II service got him buried in — and later dug up from — Arlington National Cemetery. Lawrence donated $200,000 to Democrats in 1992 and raised millions more for the party. After Clinton was elected, Lawrence reportedly begged campaign officials for jobs in the new administration for both him and his wife, whom he wanted to be chief of protocol, hosting foreign dignitaries who visit the White House. Instead, Clinton named Lawrence to be ambassador to Switzerland.
His nomination drew bipartisan cries of opposition, with both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee insisting that he was unqualified for the job. At the time of his confirmation, Lawrence had more than a dozen cases pending against him in tax court, thanks to repeatedly under-reporting his income — by millions of dollars — to the IRS. He was later fined for breaking federal campaign-finance laws for exceeding a $25,000 ceiling on donations during the 1988 election cycle. And during his background investigation for the appointment, Lawrence told federal investigators that he would recuse himself from all issues involving money laundering — the foremost diplomatic issue for the State Department in Switzerland — because a business partner had gone to prison for laundering money — through Swiss banks.